Enhancing software reuse through application- level component approach

Current component reusability is not as high as previously expected. Although third-party component providers are in present, large quantity of reduplicative programming effort is still needed in system development process. As conventional component technologies are not flexible enough to deal with requirement diversity and variability, a new type of Application-Level Component (ALC) approach is proposed. The functional granularity of ALC is larger than that of previous components, thus lowering the effort for reusing a component. By separating the stable and instable part of domain requirement, a collection of stable requirement elements can be summarized and implemented by ALCs. The instable part can then be described with a formal language according to the differences in various user cases. A novel reuse process of "selection and description" is established. The description language covers overall aspects of application system requirements, including user interface, computation logic, and database access. The description content for a system is parsed and executed by ALC to fulfill corresponding requirement. By providing different description contents, ALC can be reused in environments full of differences and changes. Evaluations reveal that the reusability of ALC is enhanced to a higher degree of 92.5~95.7%.